End of the Line
SILVER ELITE
I have a fundamental problem with the claims being made by the USWNT that they are being treated unequally, thus, illegally. That's B.S. They are treated unequally, because they bargained for a fundamentally different deal than the men. Their current claims (I read the lawsuit) don't mention the fact that the core group is salaried employees of US Soccer and the men are independent contractors that only get paid for training camps and games. From an employer perspective, its like my marketing department (WNT) complaining that the commissioned sales people (MNT) are paid more. Damn straight, because the marketing people are not on commission and can earn substantially less or substantially more, the marketing people have a less risk adverse deal. The USMNT players take the risk, the women don't take nearly the same risk.
Great, blame the victim. It's not the women's fault they had to agree to a worse deal because USSF would not pay them equally, leaving them with two bad options, either less pay or no pay.
Your hypothetical is a horrible one because it wrongly assumes the WNT (like the marketing department) deserve less opportunity than the MNT (sales department) without actually accounting for their real value. Why, exactly, isn't the MNT the less desirable marking department in your example anyway? The fact is, a job title is not a "protected class", but women are, so you can't pay them less because you deem their work to be less valuable. In other words, you can't just make the women work in the marketing department because you assume they're less valuable than men.
If you want a more accurate hypothetical, I'll give you one. You have a man and a woman in your sales department (since they do the exact same job, just like the MNT and WNT players). The male employee sucks and is borderline incompetent (just like the MNT) and you know he can't close the two biggest potential deals in company history (coincidentally with VW and Nike, go figure). Because you and the male sales guy are part of the good old boy network, though, you create a commission structure that intentionally excludes the VW and Nike contracts from commission eligibility and then make the woman do all the hard work to seal the two biggest deals in company history. Then you blame the woman for pointing out that your commission plan intentionally discriminates against women, and tell her it's her fault because she knew the whole time the company's commission structure that you created discriminates against women but she agreed to work here anyway.